Kevin,
Actually your first approach is the Tulip best practice recommendation! Tulip is designed to be “composable” meaning that you can make all these small building blocks in steps or apps and use them in many places and in many different solutions (read more here: Composable vs Monolithic Architectures). I can understand the thought of wanting to have only 1 incident reporting app, but this can actually get complicated down the line as you scale and have more and more process and apps all routing to one reporting app. We encourage thinking from the human centric approach about what makes most sense for your operators and for others looking at apps in the future to be able to replicate them.
That being said, we are going to have some focused office hours coming up (stay tuned, I will post on Community about it) about building composable solutions and our common data model that allow all of this to happen and show you how to best put this advice in to action.
I will note, @danielpomeranz does has a solution that allows you to do what you are looking for in this post [Video Tutorial] - Don't Repeat Yourself: Abstracting Repetitive Tulip Steps into Separate Apps, but I caution you to consider the “building blocks” composable approach as a recommended path from Tulip to not hinder future scalability and productivity gains.